The Trip You Keep Meaning to Take

There is a specific feeling that arrives around this time every year.

It is not quite panic. It is quieter than that. It is the feeling of looking up from your desk sometime in July and realizing the year is more than half gone, and that it went the way the last one did, and the one before that.

I feel it too. I want to be honest about that before I say anything else, because I am not writing this from above the problem. I run a company that takes people to the ends of the earth, and I still catch myself waiting for a version of my life that has more time in it. That version does not seem to be coming. I suspect you have noticed the same thing about yours.

So let me say the part that is easy to miss.

The Real Reason We Don’t Go

The reason most people do not take the trip is not money. For the people I talk to, it is almost never money. And it is not time, exactly, though that is the reason we all reach for. It is that “someday” feels safe, and a plan feels risky.

Someday asks nothing of you. It sits on the shelf, pleasant and unthreatening, a trip to the deserts of Tunisia or the temples of Japan or the mounds along the Mississippi that you will absolutely take, once things settle down. Things do not settle down. That is not a scheduling problem. It is the nature of a full life. There is always a reason the fall is not quite right.

A plan, on the other hand, is a commitment made by the person you are now, on behalf of the person you will be in a few months. It has a date. It can be gotten wrong. It requires you to decide.

And here is the quiet inversion we have watched play out at Far Horizons for more than forty years: the plan is not the risky choice. Deferral is.

The plan is not the risky choice. Deferral is. — Mary Collins

Because the trip you keep meaning to take has a cost, and the cost is not on any invoice. It is another year that looks like the last one. It is arriving at some future December with the same list, a little longer, and the same feeling of a year that slipped by unmarked. Waiting feels like the cautious option. It is actually the expensive one.

I am not going to tell you that you are running out of time, because that is the language of pressure, and pressure is not what this is about. I want to say something closer to the opposite.

You Are Allowed to Stop Waiting

You are allowed to stop waiting.

You are allowed to be the person who, in the middle of a hard year, decided to go stand somewhere two thousand years old with people who wanted to understand it as much as you do. You do not need permission for that, but if some part of you has been waiting for it anyway, consider this the permission.

What would it mean to have one real thing to show for this year? Not on a shelf — in you. A place you can compare everything else to. A story that starts with “when I was standing in the ruins at Dougga” or “the night the chamber inside the pyramid was opened just for us.” The kind of thing you can only bring back from a place you actually went.

What This Fall Actually Offers

This is the part where, if I were selling you something, I would push. I am not going to. I will just tell you the true and useful thing, which is that this fall we are running a handful of departures where “someday” happens to have a date attached. Small groups. A scholar on each one — the person who wrote the book, standing next to you at the site. Tunisia, Japan, North India, the Mississippi Valley, Egypt. If one of those has been the trip you keep meaning to take, this is a good year to take it, and I would be glad to tell you about it.

But that is not really the point of this piece, and I would rather end where I started.

The Year Isn’t Over

The year is not over. That is the whole point. There are months left in it — enough to change what it will have been. The feeling you had, looking up from your desk, was not a verdict. It was an invitation, and invitations expire only if you let them.

The trip you keep meaning to take is still available to the person willing to stop meaning to and start going.

I hope, this year, that is you.

— Mary

P.S. On the practical side: the fall departures I mentioned close for booking on July 31, and there is a small thank-you we are doing for everyone traveling with us this season. If you would like the specifics on any of the trips, or the incentive, just reply here or write to me at mary@farhorizons.com. I answer these myself.